Electronic Book Review - religionhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/tags/religion
enThe End of Exemptions for Beautyhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/ramshackle
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<div class="field-item even">William Smith Wilson</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-01-26</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The continental United States has a history with beauty and with exemptions from foreign wars. A president of the United States, Franklin Pierce, noted the exemptions in his inaugural address of March 4, 1853: “Of the complicated European systems of national polity we have heretofore been independent. From their wars, their tumults, and anxieties we have been, happily, almost entirely exempt. Whilst these are confined to the nations which gave them existence, and within their legitimate jurisdiction, they can not affect us except as they appear to our sympathies in the cause of human freedom and universal advancement.”</p>
<p>A decade later an English novelist, Anthony Trollope, demurred because exemptions had been forfeited by waging the War Between the States. He noted, “The Americans had fondly thought that they were to be exempt from the curse of war - at any rate from the bitterness of the curse. But the days for such exemptions have not come as yet.”</p>
<p>After the Civil War, although the Nation was still bullying, battling, and buying its way westward, the country seemed sufficiently exempt from European wars. That such exemptions, immunities, and impunities were unrealistic is conveyed by a whimsical statement attributed to Otto von Bismarck: “God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America.”</p>
<p>The attack on the World Trade Center made the end of exemptions observable. As early as September 12, Justin Raimondo posted remarks, “Terror at Home: the price of hegemony”: “The World Trade Center - monument towering over downtown Manhattan like twin silver phalli pointed at heaven - is but a pile of smoldering rubble. Crashing down along with this symbol of capitalism, modernity, and civilization is the overweening hubris of a government - and a people - which thought themselves immune. It is the doctrine of ‘American exceptionalism,’ the theory that the US - blessed by Providence and released from the travails faced by other nations - is immune, exempt not only from the rules that govern and limit the powers of other nations, but also from history itself…” His interpretation of the WTC as “this symbol of capitalism, modernity, and civilization” is too splashy and general. For the meaning of buildings to be more than a designated concept like “capitalism,” Raimondo must connect the “symbol” with the style of the buildings, the specifiable meanings of those specific buildings.</p>
<p>Slavoj Zizek announced that “…one thing is sure: the US, which, till now, perceived itself as an island exempted from this kind of violence, witnessing this kind of thing only from the safe distance of the TV screen, is now directly involved” (“Welcome to the Desert of the Real”). Susan Sontag, in an interview for <span class="booktitle">Salon</span> magazine with David Talbot, October 2001, mentions the popular notion of exemption: “There’s an American exceptionalism; we’re supposed to be exempt from the calamities and terrors and anxieties that beset other countries.” Responses to her statements, in <span class="booktitle">Salon</span> and in <span class="booktitle">The New Yorker</span>, show that questioning a special providence is judged an unpatriotic and irreligious subversion.</p>
<p>Within institutional religions, a few Protestant ministers have said that the exemptions granted to this most favored nation by Divine Grace have been forfeited by bad conduct. The suggestion is that a providential God who once granted exemptions has retracted them as punishment for sin. However in religions of humility, the purposes of God are unknown except insofar as they have been revealed. Only a prophet can bring such accusations, which otherwise are the work of pride. In this discussion, words for “prophet” in many languages might be translated, “a person of heroic humility,” or as “a significantly negated person.” Many persons have been reluctant to become prophets because of the negations, but have submitted to the will of God. The name of Islam is explained as “submission,” yet could be rendered “humility,” as in the humble submission in which a soul is safe within the governance of an omnipotent and loving Allah.</p>
<p>One discovery that can be made within religious adventures is that a people, a nation, a saint, or a prophet chosen by God or Allah are not exempted from suffering, and may even qualify for their tasks through their suffering. Handicaps such as blindness and stuttering can mark a person as especially receptive to the divine. Thus the relations between power and humility are misrepresented in the <span class="booktitle">New York Times</span> when it describes a “spiritual leader” who is a “most charismatic rival” to Arafat: “Crippled from a childhood injury, he is frail, uses a wheelchair and speaks in a high squeaky voice. But his uncompromising denunciations of Israel from his spartan headquarters in Gaza thrill many and inspire suicide bombers” (June 14, 2002). The truth is that even humiliations like “a high squeaky voice” authenticate charismatic leaders so that they do “thrill” and “inspire.” The adjective “Spartan” suggests the self-negation that complements the other negations.</p>
<p>The weaker the person in some worldly power, as though a power or pleasure has been sacrificed, the more heroic the piety. A person who is sightless in this world may have insight into a superior world. The rule is that for a person to qualify as a spiritual mediator, and for a spiritual act to have efficacy, self must be negated or self-negated. Prophets, saints, and martyrs do not receive exemptions from suffering, although they may be redeemed through their suffering.</p>
<p>The World Trade Center stood amid exemptions, but not comfortably. Undertones of anxiety are experienced by a character in an autobiographical novel, <span class="booktitle">How He Saved Her</span>, by Ellen Schwamm. In this novel, a woman leading a privileged life, amid many exemptions, dines with her family at the WTC, in a restaurant named Windows on the World: “The room was walled in glass on three sides. It appeared to hang, thrillingly unconcerned, in space. Planes went by, their lights winking. A city etched in colored light fanned out at their feet. Stars were scattered like buckshot across the sky around this somehow dreary room.” During the evening she meets, and falls in love with, a man who seems to grant no exemptions based on wealth or worldly power. She goes from the “thrillingly unconcerned” top of the WTC to the thrilling concerns of an unexempted life in which she will struggle toward authenticities.</p>
<p>Falling in love while dining at Windows on the World opens systems that seemed to have closed. One of the conflicts in these events is between systems that would close down over people, and systems that open possibilities. Was the WTC a closed system or an open system? Its coherence and self-consistency suggest a closed system, but the people laboring at food services, and the people working at finance, went into and out of many systems. They can be seen to have held the systems open, restoring, maintaining, and even increasing possibilities. According to obituaries which have been written as vivaciously as possible, people who worked in the WTC did not separate the beauty of their experiences from the beauty of the buildings as architectural objects.</p>
<p>The question of the beauty of the WTC survives. Since I rarely used the buildings except as a platform from which to view a spectacle, I did not experience the beauty of open constructive processes in which workers participated. Like many others in Manhattan, I now think the buildings to have been beautiful in a way that I did not see earlier. Then I saw, but did not feel, while now I feel, but can no longer see. I would like to change my testimony.</p>
<p>My experiences of beauty have yielded impressions of what beauty is for me - a sense of the actively beautiful as that with which I desire to conceive something. I see no reason to limit an inspiration to conceive to the physical or to the mental. If with the beautiful I find myself desiring to conceive something, and if I grant exemptions, and no longer put up resistance, I feel an increase in the available energy. Then what are some of the possible relations among beauty, energy, and exemptions? We see in ordinary events that the beautiful person, place or “thing” is more likely to be granted exemptions than the plain or the ugly. In an economics of energy, such exemptions save energy that isn’t spent overcoming resistances. Although beauty can never be quantified, an observer could calculate the degree to which a closed system will open for a beautiful person in ordinary social events. Such exemptions for beauty reach the theme of possibility, because the beautiful opens possibilities in a system.</p>
<p>In the case of the WTC, the attack was aimed by one-system people against multi-system people. The use of one system, especially one that would close over itself in absolute consistency, is dangerous, because closed systems run out of energy. An apparent waste of energy among resentful people is visible in Manhattan, where a Muslim mosque has been built by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. Years ago I toured it with its articulate architect, the late Michael McCarthy, the painter and sculptor John Willenbecher, and an Imam who followed our every discalced step, listening with piercing attention. Earlier McCarthy explained that the minaret in Manhattan is a structure that cannot be used by a muezzin to call people to prayer, because loud announcements are illegal. Some Islamic scholars, and McCarthy, judged a minaret to be a structure with no function, hence no meaning. However: “Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmed Al-Jaber Al-Sabah the Amir of the state of Kuwait, …during his visit to New York in September 1988 pledged to donate whatever amount is necessary to complete the construction of the minaret.” As of today, that silent minaret calls the faithful to resent their position under secular power, and to await the dawn of theocracy, when its use might become possible. A minaret waiting beside a mosque on the Upper East Side of Manhattan is important because the WTC has been compared with Islamic buildings in Mecca, even by its architect, Minoru Yamasaki. The style of the WTC is described by Laurie Kerr, whose essay in <span class="lightEmphasis">Slate</span> magazine is a source of my grateful wonder. Yamasaki designed the King Fahd Dharan Air Terminal in Saudi Arabia. His design “…had a rectilinear, modular plan with pointed arches, interweaving tracery of prefabricated concrete, and even a minaret of a flight tower. In other words, it was an impressive melding of modern technology and traditional Islamic form.”</p>
<p>The next year Yamasaki won the commission for the WTC: “Yamasaki described its plaza as ‘a mecca, a great relief from the narrow streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area’.” “Yamasaki’s courtyard mimicked Mecca’s assemblage of holy sites–the Qaaba…and the holy spring–by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca’s. At the base of the towers, Yamasaki used implied pointed arches–derived from the characteristically pointed arches of Islam…” Kerr concludes with precision and lucidity: “To bin Laden, the World Trade Center was probably not only an international landmark but a false idol.”</p>
<p>To compare the WTC with Mecca blurs the difference between the profane and sacred. The WTC could never be more than a demonic parody of Mecca, which is a place in which Allah acts from within eternity on the temporal, and from within infinity on the finite. However, on the Internet, someone writes that a person as insightful as bin Laden “…would have instead felt proud that Islamic architecture and Islamic metaphors figured so prominently in the biggest symbol of Western capitalism.” (Cairolive 01/03/02). This statement underestimates the offense to a religion in which spiritual pollutions are as vile as sins or moral faults. A secular appropriation of Islamic motifs is a misappropriation that pollutes the faith, and is not taken for a compliment. Any such secular judgments are of absolutely no interest within the faith, if only because few Euro-American judgments are of any interest. In Saudi Arabia, an airport with Islamic motifs can glorify Allah, so that a picture of that airport on paper-money is sufficiently pious. But secular buildings in Manhattan with derivative Islamic motifs can but distract from the architecture of faith.</p>
<p>One theme in the attack in September 2001 is punishment for our methods of thinking as those blithely pollute Islam. By December 2002, speculation on future attacks should look at other pollutions of Islam, and then follow implications toward the source of the pollution. Because Buddhist sculpture defiled Afghanistan and offended a rival faith, it has been annihilated by purifiers. So speculation should ask: Are any non-Islamic religious sites insulting to Islam? Which secular themes violate the truth of Islam? What other impurities can be exorcised? A favorite on my list is the International Space Station, because it anguishes the sky above Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. These themes will be clarified the next time a pious Muslim, or an Arabian-American, applies to become an astronaut.</p>
<p>The design of the Saudi Arabian airport and of the WTC recall an era in which a theme, often implicit in American art, became explicit and sufficient: possibility. In its openness to change, possibility differs in degrees from probability, which is a condition of fewer options. If degrees of probability continue to increase, they may reach necessity, when a system closes over itself, consistent as a sphere. A peculiar hope, characteristic of much significant visual art in the United States through the 1960s and 1970s, has been to act without reducing possibilities to probabilities, and without exhausting the probabilities into necessities.</p>
<p>The hope of secular optimism is to keep situations as full of possibility at the conclusion of a series of events as at the beginning. The art and the architecture that convey images and ideas of secular possibilities after the Enlightenment are often called “Minimal,” a dead-end notion. In a compromise, I call the style Minimal-Operational or Operational-Minimal, trying to point toward the use of explicit abstract operations that remain visible in the specifiable operations used on materials. Operations can be separated into two kinds at least, abstract operations and concrete operations. Abstract operations work with abstract objects. For example, mathematical operations are abstract, reversible, and ever possible. An abstract operation is not physical, so it can be applied again and again without being diminished or depleted. Abstract operations are applied in specifications and measurements when constructing concrete objects.</p>
<p>Concrete operations apply abstract operations in the construction of concrete objects. While abstract operations are intellectually reversible, concrete operations are irreversible when used in the construction of buildings, yet can still feel “operational.” With the WTC, abstract operations could be inferred from the concrete actions that followed explicit abstract operations. In Operational-Minimal art and architecture, irreversible concrete operations illustrate the reversible abstract operations that have been applied.</p>
<p>A living organic structure follows a temporal order with three parts: 1) possibility in the beginning; 2) probabilities, as those possibilities diminish in the middle of life; and 3) necessities which shape the end, after probabilities have been exhausted. The parts of a living organism are conceived of as interdependent within a system, enjoying flexible interrelations within a process that is closed by the necessity of dying. While the acorn is destined to become an oak tree, as an organism the tree is destined both to produce seeds and later to die. In Islamic art, organic objects are rarely, if at all, represented in the process of birth, life, and death. Rather than the beginning, middle, and end of an organism, flowers are shown in a moment of fullness that bodies forth the timeless ideal of the flower. Organisms are represented in the moment in which their contract with eternity has been fulfilled.</p>
<p>The ideal of such works of art is to show the temporal as it touches the eternal, rather than as it bodies forth “organic form.” In contrast, through much of the 19th and 20th centuries in Euro-America, works of visual art have been seen as “organic” forms. In art as organic form, the hope has been that organic art will exhibit the “livingness” of an organism, yet will not die like an organism. More recently, as visual arts criticized false illusions in the art of organic forms, they both negated the idea of necessary interrelations among parts, and set in motion ideas and images of continuous possibility. However the secular theme of possibility in secular operational art differs radically from the themes of continuous possibility in religious art. In Islamic art, possibility is entirely within the will of Allah. The two approaches to possibility, in this finite world and in the Infinity of Paradise, need not have interfered with each other, but they collided when the WTC was built with Islamic motifs. Such motifs shaped to express otherworldly possibilities were misused as decorative details within a stunning expression of worldly possibilities.</p>
<p>A stark contrast can demonstrate a different understanding of the qualities of an open and of a closed system. Setting aside Islam for a moment to look at Euro-American history in the 1960s, systems that would have closed down over open systems were pried open. This opening of possibilities was occurring in religions, politics, and the arts. Circumstances that we had been told were necessary and inevitable were changed. Start with Councils in the Vatican in which the Catholic Church rethought its identity in fresh images. Look at the situations in Paris, 1968. Around the world, more people began to struggle for and to receive more justice than had ever been possible in the history of civilizations. More people had more constructive possibilities than had ever been available. American secular art and architecture may not have had direct effects, yet they did participate in the mood of the period. What I call Operational-Minimal art, and technological architecture like the WTC, conveyed feelings and ideas of constructive possibility by bodying forth explicit abstract operations. In my experience, that art and architecture operated against ideologies that would have closed down over the minds of people, rendering innocent possibilities impossible.</p>
<p>By the 1960s and 1970s, the problem for some architects has long been how to get a commercial building to express values inherent in technological architecture. Part of the solution was to let materials qua materials remain visible on the surface. The style would not subordinate its materials and methods of building to an architectural illusion. Such materiality of the materials would in effect scratch the surface of the aesthetic experience. And those materials would be hard-edged and in sharp-focus by explicitly manifesting abstract operations. Concrete poured in straight lines, and simple modules in a potentially infinite series, would suffice. Decorative motifs like Saudi Arabian arches both compromised the operational architecture and misused Islam.</p>
<p>The WTC belongs with operational, technological architecture, yet it was less aloof than most. As a whole spacious complex, it hailed a passerby to choose a “desire-line,” that is, to choose a path across an open plaza, guided by whims and responsibilities. Even a person arriving for daily work could respond to one of many options, improvising, while answering a summons toward work intended to increase possibilities. As people say, the buildings made a statement. The statement I accepted was a statement on the theme of worldly possibilities within rational but inspired commercial activities. The buildings stood as models for actions which did not subside into exhausted necessities, but which maintained and increased the possibilities for further constructive actions. Such possibilities imply that the closed can be opened, and that the future can become more than falling passively into place.</p>
<p>I am using the word “possibility” in ways bound to distress some readers. A word is not a concept already out there, humming with meanings. The word gathers meanings when and how it is used to point with toward something, to refer to an abstract object or a concrete object. And on this theme of reference, nothing in itself refers to anything else. The meaning of anything as a reference is constructed when the “thing” is used to refer. The arches at the WTC could be used to refer to Islamic arches by those who know the history of arches; or they could be enjoyed as a flourish, and not used to refer to anything other than generic arches. Although the arches were not necessarily used as a sign of anything by many people, surely they were recognized by students of city-planning. Mohammed Atta, writing a dissertation on a city-scape, could have taught himself to be offended by the theft of traditional Islamic motifs.</p>
<p>Architecture can try to show us how to live, with its use of materials, structures and functions as a model for the way we should live now. The hope is that a building of technological architecture measures up to trustworthy people who strive to measure up to the trustworthy building. At the WTC, technological architecture took account of human feelings, but called people from their congested subjectivity toward an objectivity visible in the abstract geometry. The experience is familiar, but I want it to be seen as somewhat strange: the people and the place were each answerable to the other, a process of reciprocal critiques and reciprocal modifications. If the people said to the buildings, Function efficiently and vivaciously, the buildings could ask the same of the people.</p>
<p>How could the WTC embody possibility any more than other buildings? Note that a copy of a skyscraper is not necessary, nor even very probable. Yet the Twin Towers of the WTC suggested that after finishing one tower, the builders went back to the plans in order to build a second tower. If two buildings are built largely from one plan, then that plan is perceived as abstract, its possibilities undiminished by use, in contrast with the unique use of one set of plans on one specific building.</p>
<p>The identicalness of the two buildings did not limit possibilities, because the buildings were not flush with each other, but each set back in relation to the other. Walking from one building to the other on the plaza, a person was confronted by the symmetries of the buildings in asymmetrical positions. A straight line was not possible from door to door, so that anyone walking needed to improvise a turn between the one and the other. A turn, even within a routine such as arriving for work, enables a person to see people, places, or things from more than one viewpoint, and then to continue to invent a path into a new situation. Permission was granted to choose your path, and later to change it. The buildings encouraged the freedom to set oneself in motion on a path of one’s responsible desires. Losing my way so often, I frequently invented new paths toward Innovation Luggage.</p>
<p>This specific architecture expressed possibility more intensely and persuasively than other buildings in at least three ways: 1) the twoness, as in the name, Twin Towers; 2) the non-identical positions of almost identical towers; 3) the unnecessary but possible height. The buildings were tall in order to express hopes emerging from technology and world trade, rather than hope for spiritual heightening. Commercial motives, like the fame of the tallest buildings attracting tenants into expensive offices, explain nothing. The many critical statements that the buildings symbolized capitalism overlook the need for a building to produce a revelation from within its structures and functions. Such a revelation is not a meaning imposed on the exterior of buildings, it is the advent of a concept within the sensory experience. Let the meaning of a building as a symbol emerge from its specific materials, colors, and shapes, and from the style of life toward which the building summons people. If the architects get the right architectural combination of structures and functions, then meaning and symbolism can almost take care of themselves.</p>
<p>A problem with my celebration of possibility qua possibility is naïve oversimplification, an obliviousness to the existence of evil. Yes, technology increases possibilities, and yes, it can be used to open and reopen systems that would close down over us. But nothing within technology as such can describe differences between good and bad, or constructive and destructive. So while possibility as a theme can seem entirely secular, pertaining only to immanences, even possibilities must be judged in relation to human purposes as good, or true, or beautiful. Such judgments use concepts from outside the world, criteria not derived from events, yet inseparable from experience. These concepts are not immanent, but transcendental, and in my experience, some version of them is inescapable. Yet these are precisely the concepts that secular philosophy either denies if it opposes them, or has difficulty justifying if it accepts them. Enlightened secularism is at a disadvantage in its relations with Islam, because Islam has no hesitation in justifying judgments of transcendent values like goodness, truth, and beauty, securely founded on the will of Allah.</p>
<p>Technology and rationality can support each other, but rationality gets into trouble. As soon as rationality admits that it uses and needs concepts that transcend experience of the world, concepts like true and false, then such abstract concepts can be used as models for the existence of unworldly abstract entities like angels and devils. Transcendentals tend to overlap, that is, to be predicable of each other, the way the good is also the beautiful. Thus the good can be bodied forth as an angel, mixing abstract transcendental concepts with abstract transcendental entities. Because transcendental philosophic concepts overlap, these two concepts, rationality and transcendence, must overlap. Thus we lose criteria for empirical reality the moment we enter rationalist thinking, because rational thought uses some transcendentals, and cannot prevent other transcendental concepts from mixing with transcendental entities.</p>
<p>Euro-American rational and secular thought cannot restrain any of the Islams, but some of the Islams can annihilate the meanings of Euro-American science and technology. Religious systems can use technology for their purposes without responding to any ethics or aesthetics of technology. At their edges religions can even defy criteria of efficiency, reliability, and economy, as in building useless minarets. Fundamentalist preachers in several faiths use television or cassette-tapes to reach semi-literate people, but they overwhelm the technology, with its inherent values, with imposed transcendental values. Empiricism must lament that while modern technology has arisen with open covenants openly arrived at between technology and other systems, technology itself can never impose its values or offer itself as the only system. Technology cannot negate religion, but religion can subsume and negate technology.</p>
<p>Technology cannot but emphasize possibilities, constructing opportunities for novel actions. But such actions can entail self-assertions that amount to an idolatry of the self, a version of polytheism. The contrary to such possibility is the necessity that must be yielded to because it is the will of Allah. Because everything belongs to Allah, and is a gift, the self is nothing in itself. An apparent life and an apparent self only become a real life and a real self after death, which therefore is not negative but positive, and is not an end, but a beginning. That posthumous beginning is the beginning of possibilities on another plane of existence, that is, in Paradise, a realm of continuous possibilities that never subside into probability or necessity.</p>
<p>The theme of negations eventually reaches the theme of exemptions. What are the relations between negations and exemptions? In this historical situation, American exemptions and self-exemptions inspire other people to negate them. In pragmatic terms, the attack on the World Trade Center is inefficient and non-productive, since the attack does not produce food, clothing, or shelter for a single person. But for the men in the attacks, an air-attack on an impregnable city in the United States is the external negation of the negations of Islam, especially its lost exemptions. Those men did not take their revenge on the specific individuals working in the WTC, but on a society that acts on behalf of Becoming at the expense of Being, ignoring Allah, the Ground of Being. For people in a pragmatic mood, a question to ponder is, What positive is constructed by a negation? Can a practical people, embracing technology, understand the religious uses of negation? Although we are familiar with dedicated technologists who become self-forgetful and self-sacrificing when inspired to work, their selflessness or self-emptying is not the kind of negation that facilitates mediation between Becoming and Being, between finite and Infinite, or between temporal and Eternal. Technology cannot use religions and spiritual negations to solve technological problems, but religions can use technologies even while negating their inherent values.</p>
<p>To qualify to perform in that event of 9/11, the actors qualified themselves by their internal negation, that is, by self-negations of their personalities. In their actions until September 10th, the men appeared to negate their Muslim identities with casual American deportment. Why should Americans be suspicious of foreign men who are learning to fly, but not to take off or to land airplanes? After all, what could resentful dispossessed aliens do to the exempted people of an exempted nation? Then, on September 11th, they first negated the American in themselves, and then negated themselves, by a complete annihilation that was difficult to comprehend because of unfamiliarity with concepts that are not empirical or pragmatic. Revealingly, although a large majority of the population of the United States claims faith in transcendental religions, the attack on the World Trade Center was not perceived and judged as a religious act, the only terms in which it is intelligible.</p>
<p>The citizens of the Islamic world matter to themselves in ways that do not matter to the U.S. government. A question arises: Who comprehends the lost power, glory, privilege, and exemption of those people? Who can respect and describe their different methods of thinking? The answer is that the persons qualified to explain fundamentalist Islam to our government are sincere fundamentalist Christians. Radical Christians not only share incomprehension by secular authorities, they share resentments, their awareness of angels, their faith in a book as the revealed word of God, and their modes of transcendental illuminations. Those Christians in the United States who would annihilate their enemies are the experts who could explain Islam at its extremes.</p>
<p>When a something that participates in a positive is opposed by a something that participates in a negative, the conflict is uneven, and the opponents are misaligned. The men who seized the planes used technological power to negate the military-political powers that in their experience negated them. But more positively, and from their point of view constructively, they negated themselves in order to offer themselves unconditionally to a Power of Powers. The difference between the American and the Islamic claims to exemptions is the difference between those Americans who do not go through negation or self-negation to get to the positive, and those Muslims who understand this universal truth: only negations and self-negations qualify persons for increases in spiritual power and spiritual exemptions. Even giving alms to the poor is a self-denial that can generate a positive spiritual experience. In the background is the understanding that the greatest selflessness is love. Such love entails an ultimate and absolutely selfless self-negation because the lover must prefer the good of the beloved to the good of the lover. The love of Allah is manifest in that Allah knows, better than any person can, the good for that person. Ideally, love is reciprocated, so that the two are both lover and beloved, and as lover, each prefers the good of the beloved to the lover’s good. At least I hear that it is so in Paradise.</p>
<p>I offer as a curiosity of the religious imagination that the one concept in which radically different theologies participate is the concept of nothing. However variously negation is understood, every religion seems to have its own self-sacrifice and self-emptying, associated with kenosis. A person who achieves the blankness of the emptied self can reach toward new possibilities in faith, hope, and love. Thus, for the faithful, true experience for the soul begins <span class="foreignWord">ex nihilo</span>, spiritual possibilities opening only after a person has annihilated self, or parts of self. Many people who feel negated by America respond with grievances, resentments, and loathings, and a few of them will negate themselves in the faith that their self-annihilation will carry their souls into Paradise. Nothing is where comprehension of the men who flew themselves toward their deaths must begin.</p>
<p>The interpretation and judgment of “suicides” brings back the opposition between two theories of authentic life. At an extreme of emancipation, some people are trying to experience authentic life as satisfaction of their most individual needs and desires, physical, and psychical. Call that authenticity of immanences, and let Jean Genet represent it. Other people are trying to experience authentic life within their monotheistic faith, call that authenticity of transcendentals, let Jeanne d’Arc represent it. Both Jeanne d’Arc and Jean Genet did violence to ordinary life on behalf of absolutes. Each subverted orthodoxies, whether of society or of religion, as each pursued a goal of absolute purity, obedience of the self or obedience of God. Jeanne obeyed the laws of God as revealed from outside her, and Jean obeyed the laws of his own nature as revealed within him. She subscribed to a faith in authentication by God, while he believed in an autonomous self-authentication. Each had to violate the laws of society and government to demonstrate that they were not conforming to ordinary conventions or laws. Such absolutist purity of Saint Joan and of “Saint” Genet was their solution to problems of authentic life. But if you ask me, I think that a person can and should participate in both extremes, transcendence and immanence, while holding each plane answerable to the other in order to avoid the destructive violence of absolutist authenticity.</p>
<p>I offer an adjustment of perspectives to show those men piloting those airplanes dying to their modern selves as the only authenticating act open to them. Throughout these events, when the physical plane intersects with the spiritual plane, adjustments of vision are necessary to see apparent events as they become real within a providential plan of Allah. Death is not death: “Think not of those who are slain in Allah’s way as dead. Nay, they live, finding their sustenance in the presence of their Lord.” Some people practicing a faith have said, “I believe it because it is impossible,” and some have called for greater absurdities in order to challenge reason with faith. In such contexts, faith negates reason. Such faith so revises perceptions that their dying is not suicide, it is a spiritual self-emptying, visible if we see that the men died with a purpose beyond dying. Comprehension of the attacks should understand that to act like a suicide-pilot, one must hold faith like a suicide-pilot.</p>
<p>The spiritual use of emptiness and of self-negation combines with my theme, that possibilities diminish into worldly probabilities, and probabilities increase until they become necessities, but that self-negation can reopen possibilities. These concepts turn and twist, difficult to control, but their resilience is their strength. Suppose we ask, What are the relations between emptiness and possibility? An American Archbishop has publicly confessed after he has been cornered by necessity and has lost his freedom of movement. He lists his feelings as “…remorse, contrition, shame, and emptiness” (New York Times 06/01/22). Of course when he lists “emptiness” he inserts a sleepy word that might reawaken. Yes, he feels the futility of a career that has come to nothing, or worse, almost nothing, so he suffers emptiness. But as a religious sophisticate, he has learned about redemptive suffering, and about how self-negation can restore possibilities. His emptiness entitles the Archbishop to hope for his future, because in emptiness begins possibility.</p>
<p>The narrative of the life of Mohammed is told with anecdotes that suggest the resistance and humiliation he suffered in this world, and his self-negation in the sense of his humility in relation to Allah. He mentions his ignorance about his own death as an example of his limited knowledge. Within the biographical anecdotes Mohammed incarnated humility, manifest in his unknowing. Knowing that he did not know, he did not overreach by presuming to know the mind and will of Allah. He knew that he needed revealed knowledge, a gift from a transcendental plane that strengthened his humility, not his pride. These thoughts are so common to religions that T. S. Eliot can focus the judgment into a fixed point: “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire/ Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.” Let endless be understood as a continuum of possibilities available through humility.</p>
<p>“Submission” is a governing Islamic concept that overlaps and suffuses humility. Miracles of faith are miracles of submission to the faith. Associating Mohammed with submission, his self-denials qualify Mohammed to mediate between two realms, transmitting, and receiving without encountering resistances. Prophets and martyrs, persons of heroic sanctity who overcome their resistance to the will of God or Allah, achieve the sublime. I am going to call them mystics.</p>
<p>My statement, which shocks even me, is that at least four of those men must be credited with sincere faith, and in these speculations must be called mystics. The hypothesis of mysticism is more adequate to events than “terrorists.” Of course some of these “martyrs” visited a club where women strip and perform mock-sexual acts, where some men drank alcohol and otherwise violated laws and customs of their religion, showing themselves in a parody of Americans that made them invisible to Americans. Clearly these men, at least the few certain to have known the plans, did not conform to orthodox Muslim conduct.</p>
<p>By September, the men to pilot the planes were approaching the mystical marriage of their souls in Paradise. Because they were about to be married, an evening of entertainment before their weddings looks like a grotesque American bachelor party. A bachelor party offers the groom a last indulgent assertion of lone selfhood, immediately before the loss of autonomy within marriage. A reference to such a coarse event is a coarse reference, but either men about to die were entertaining themselves to kill time, or they were participating in a coherent pattern in which meretricious fullness of sensory experience precedes ritual and mythic emptying.</p>
<p>Only some exaggeration will get near the truth here. These “mystics” were extricating themselves from their unjust and humiliating marriage to existence. They divorced themselves from the secular world in preparation for an equitable marriage in Paradise. The very method of the marriage would make them worthy of the love they would receive. They will not be understood until they are perceived as bridegrooms flying themselves into their weddings.</p>
<p>The men suffered pollutions at their lowest point, descending before ascending. After some risky self-pollutions, as they approached the end of time for them, they were to remove all body hair in a ritual of cleaning, and were to follow rituals of self-purification on the morning of their flights. In this paragraph, a ritual is an act that enables a soul to participate in a transcendental continuum (the parallel in a religion of immanences in the Cosmos is a ritual that enables a soul to participate in a continuum of immanences). Accordingly, a transcendental myth is a story about the participation of a soul in a transcendental continuum (God; Allah). I am looking for the plot of a myth the men were enacting: first their meretricious fullness of self amid discontinuities, then their emptying of self in order to qualify to enter the Continuum of Continuums. In a ritual intended to construct a small continuum of its own, the men were instructed to pray continuously, in an uninterrupted series, calling on an absolute negative, “no god,” to support their positive faith: “There is no God but Allah.”</p>
<p>The continuous series of identical prayers, where the repetition does not diminish the power, has many analogies in these events. Allow that a non-Muslim man who in this world marries one woman begins a process that will go through possibility into probability and then into necessity, a quasi-organic dramatic structure with a beginning, middle, and end. Now picture experiences in Paradise with seventy-two women, sometimes called “virgins.” On a theme of possibility, one virgin in a series bodies forth possibility in a way that a wife does not. Setting aside the women, look at the number seventy two. In October, 680, Hussein ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet, led seventy-one of his family and followers to certain death in battle. A series of seventy two entities, whether white raisins, virgins, or martyrs, does not accumulate probabilities until they add up to necessities. Each encounter with each of seventy two entities is as full of virginal possibilities as the first.</p>
<p>The elements that succeed each other do not differ significantly from each other. They are arranged in a series that is not organic, but seriatim. Wary questions have been asked about male tumescence and the seriatim virgins, and have been answered by a Sheik in New Jersey who has promised continuous erections in Paradise (that Sheik is blind, hence is qualified to see beyond this world, like Tiresias, Oedipus, and John Milton). Moreover, in some folk theology, upon the Day of Judgment the soul of a “martyr” receives a gift, a kind of dowry, the right to bring seventy two souls into Paradise. So the families of these men who have died in order to enter Paradise are entitled to expect to be welcomed there. Such is the mystical power of martyrs.</p>
<p>In a series of perhaps seventy two entities, each is no more and no less possible than the one before it. Non-cumulative series should be held next to the stories of <span class="booktitle">The Thousand and One Nights</span>. A thousand episodes are not structured like chapters of a novel in which actions emerge “organically” from prior actions. An organic aesthetic structure is like a snake with its tail in its mouth, with mutual implications between the beginning and the end. In contrast, each of Scheherazade’s stories pauses when the narrative blooms with possibilities. With her series, Scheherazade uses possibility to free her from the probability that the conclusion of a story will bring the necessity of death.</p>
<p>How do these series, outside the rhythms of human organic time, relate to the World Trade Center? The very word “series” should evoke the context of the 1960s and 1970s, when organicism was dissolved by the use of mechanical or mathematical series. In architecture, the repetition of units in the WTC enacted the same non-cumulative possibility, the force of sustained possibilities without a dramatic climax. Perhaps neither Osama bin Laden nor anyone in Islam knew or cared about Operational-Minimal styles expressing secular possibilities. But we should be able to see that Islamic series are grounded in a transcendental continuum, and would be degraded if mixed with secular series in temporal experiences. While flowers in Dutch paintings bud, bloom, wither, and die, Islamic flowers hold their bloom outside the passage of time. In Islamic art, a temporal sequence is not visible because a series of flowers is arranged in an abstract pattern in which they preserve their fullness at a steady level.</p>
<p>Within the art, visible in the calligraphy, movement along an arabesque differs from movement along a straight line or even a regular curve. If one walks a straight line into a landscape, following it will bring one to the goal at the end of the line. However if one walks on an arabesque path, the gradual turns do not lead straight ahead or in a direct reversal, but offer a person a series of perspectives that demonstrate that no one point of view is sufficient. Such a series, grounded in a continuum, does not reduce possibility toward inevitability. Some people following arabesques of thought see no reason to be persuaded by verified facts, hence decline to believe a report that concludes without taking into account the will of Allah. Misunderstandings of Arabic responses to the attack need to be corrected: a moderate Muslim need not support bin Laden or murder in order to understand that the event conformed to the will of Allah, otherwise it would not have occurred.</p>
<p>If Islamic art is judged to be decorative, one reason is that forms do not reach a climax and then subside. Just as pictures of flowers do not follow the fate of a seed that grows into a tree which is doomed to die, the renunciation of organic processes is visible in the images of the nineteen men who attacked the WTC. They are pictured as men for whom much remained possible in this world, yet who sacrificed possibilities for eternal necessities. On September 11th, the men set in motion a course of action in which they would reach a point of no return. They were instructed in a letter to strike like champions who do not want to come back to this world. Once they had closed off mundane possibilities, the men would enter their sublime, the irresistible necessities of Allah. The men are seen in their own cultures to have completed themselves by negating themselves, while people killed by the actions of those men are mourned because they will never complete their organic lives.</p>
<p>Again and again, we must adjust our vision if we are to see events as the men in the planes could have seen them, crediting them with sincere faith and with profound concepts. In the perspectives of Islamic terrorists, martyrs and/or mystics, the negation of negations opens transcendental possibilities. So we have arrived at a different set of possibilities from the secular possibilities of the WTC. The conflict between religious and secular possibilities is uneven, because secular possibilities are disadvantaged by confusion in their relations with renunciations, and self-negations. The contemporary American secular is defenseless because it is foundationless and pathless, with no reasoned suggestions about what is to be done now.</p>
<p>The destructions at the WTC are mystical acts, negations of negations in order to produce a positive good. The fundamentalists are people who proudly judge that they know the good for other people better than those other people know their good for themselves. As usual, the sin of presumption is overlooked by radical fundamentalists who presume to know the good for themselves, for other people and for Allah. So let those men be mystics, but then allow that mystics can be good or bad, constructive or destructive, while taking a terrible chance by gambling on their supposed knowledge of the will of Allah. Notice that on September 7th, “Atta goes to Shuckum’s Oyster Bar and Grill in Hollywood, Florida with Marwan Al-Shehhi. According to bar staff, Atta spends almost 4 hours at the pinball machine drinking cranberry juice, while Al-Shehhi drinks alcohol with an unidentified male companion.” Mohammed Atta’s name suggests a soul of humility. He meditated at a pinball machine, playing a series of games for hours, perhaps humbled by a machine that submits a ball to the interplay of gravity, a technological contrivance, and a human knack. He looks to me like nothing so much as a man contemplating his life as a purposeless game of pinball until he annihilates himself in his mystical marriage…</p>
<p style="text-align:center">********</p>
<p>The effects of September on my family were mild, and no one is complaining. I had no worries about my family, with one daughter at work for an art’s agency in Manhattan, another daughter teaching in Ohio, and my son working somewhere on an architectural project. His wife and son were visiting her family in Ireland. After I saw the North Tower collapse, I made some rough calculations and walked home. Soon an e-mail message arrived from Cork, Ireland: DO NOT PANIC. My daughter-in-law Mary Quinn Wilson, my grandson Jackson, and Mary’s mother, Anne Quinn, had emplaned from Dublin. The message reported that the plane had returned to Dublin, but the message was wrong. While the words DO NOT PANIC have scarred my memory, my anguished moments are nothing when compared to the griefs of people cherishing their children on the other planes, those being used as instruments of faith.</p>
<p>Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower carrying two parents, Daniel Brandhorst and Ronald Gamboa, married for ten years. This couple, as an outward sign of their love, had adopted at birth three years earlier their son, David. Whatever the two men had suffered, they had subsumed it in tenderness for their son with whom they were flying home. Then understand that three-year-old David disappeared with his two fathers, in a place that is no longer a place.</p>
<p>A constructed family like that of Daniel, Ronald, and David held open a system of family that has never been as closed as some people like to think. These two men did not reject an ideal of family in order to follow their whims. And they did not renounce their innate desires for the sake of abstract ideals. They used the materials they had been given to construct a family somewhere between an ideal family and a possible family, giving the love they had to give as they could give it.</p>
<p>The approach of these men to the grace of life did not require them to act violently, either to prove their participation in transcendent ideals, or to demonstrate their obedience of immanent desires. If they were like most people most of the time, adjusting the rival claims of transcendentals and of immanences, that is my point. Muddling through among amiable doubts, familial uncertainties, marital compromises, and parental imperfections seems to me more constructive than actions devised to prove either pure transcendence or pure immanence. A triangle does not need to be an ideal in the mind of God, it can be an abstract object near enough to be within our reach. Without the impossible infinities, Euclidian geometric forms become useful in specifications for actual shapes in poured concrete, not models of impossible transcendental perfection.</p>
<p>I am not saying more than that the way we live now, for all the ills it sees, and for all its lack of absolute foundations, is better than pursuit of an extreme purity that is proved by violence against the “impure.” Even if the terrorist-pilots were mystics, some mystics are idolaters of self, overestimating their power and righteousness. Even I can quote Scripture: “Do not become righteous overmuch, nor show yourself excessively wise. Why should you cause desolation to yourself?” I suggest that submission to this wisdom of Solomon is fully in accord with submission to the will of Allah, at least as Mohammed the Prophet conveyed it.</p>
<p>And me? I am seventy years old, and my years have fallen into a structure of early possibilities, later probabilities, and now, my season of poignant harvests. I saw the first Tower collapse, and hours later saw dust rise as the third building collapsed. One afternoon a few days later, walking onto a nearby pier, I put one and one together - many people were wearing masks, and I had a troubled awareness in my breathing. I sensed from the mildest difficulty that I was breathing dirt from floors falling onto lower falling floors, pumping out unthinkable dust that no machine could breathe for us. Obviously our breathing could never be virtual or simulated breathing. At no time could representations or simulations or spectacles suffice. I can say that on September 11th, that while my metaphorical floor was knocked out from under me, and that my metaphorical breath was knocked out of me, I nevertheless needed to stand on a literal floor and to breathe the dubious air.</p>
<p>Certainly our realities are so manipulated into mere images that people sometimes fear that they cannot stand and breathe in their own reality. What is there to say, if speaking from a commitment? In <span class="booktitle">Work on Myth</span>, Hans Blumenberg asks us to question an apparent impossibility: “But what if there were still something to say, after all?” One something that can still be said is that Americans are going to have to produce the truth about the end of exemptions for beauty and goodness. 9/11 annihilated the assumption that America was exempted from the suffering like that of people who live with perpetual terror. If we had any exemptions, we forfeited them: America has been ugly for a long time.</p>
<p>However, justice must listen to appeals, and as an open system should grant retrials. As my last whim, turning my thought toward possibilities, I quote Ralph Waldo Emerson’s hopeful note: “There is an elasticity in the American mind which may redeem us….”</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/wtc">WTC</a>, <a href="/tags/islam">islam</a>, <a href="/tags/ellen-schwamm">Ellen Schwamm</a>, <a href="/tags/world-trade-center">World Trade Center</a>, <a href="/tags/yamasaki">Yamasaki</a>, <a href="/tags/allah">Allah</a>, <a href="/tags/united-states">united states</a>, <a href="/tags/minaret">minaret</a>, <a href="/tags/allah">Allah</a>, <a href="/tags/religion">religion</a>, <a href="/tags/politics">politics</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodernism">postmodernism</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator826 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comWhat Would Žižek Do? Redeeming Christianity's Perverse Corehttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/heretical
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Eric Dean Rasmussen</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2005-12-18</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>In three recent books - <span class="booktitle">The Fragile Absolute</span>, <span class="booktitle">On Belief</span>, and <span class="booktitle">The Puppet and the Dwarf</span> - Slavoj Žižek calls on the Left to reclaim the Christian legacy from the religious Right. Read collectively, this series (each title published by three different scholarly presses) provides a sustained attack on two pervasive modes of ‘PC-ness’ - political correctness and perverse Christianity - that help perpetuate the current neoliberal consensus regarding the inevitability, and perhaps the desirability, of global socioconomic inequality. Focusing primarily on <span class="booktitle">The Puppet and the Dwarf</span>, the last and most substantive of the triptych, my reading focuses on four aspects of Žižek’s typically circuitous argument regarding Christianity’s potential as a progressive liberating force. In what follows I explain Žižek’s animosity towards postmodern spirituality, consider how Žižek’s pro-Christian stance differs from Right-wing positions, examine Walter Benjamin’s influence on Žižek’s historical materialism, and make explicit the ethical distinction between Christianity’s “perverse core” and its “subversive kernel.”</p>
<p>Slavoj Žižek’s subtitle - “The Perverse Core of Christianity” - seems to promise an account of all that is corrupt in the Christian faith. Readers aware of Žižek’s reputation as a leading Leftist theorist but unfamiliar with the Slovenian philosopher’s thinking might open <span class="booktitle">The Puppet and the Dwarf</span> expecting a neo-Nietzschean or post-Marxist critique of Christianity. But Žižek doesn’t censure Christians for subscribing to a ‘slave morality’ or becoming addicted to an ‘opiate for the masses.’ Instead, it’s liberals, especially Western intellectuals with disavowed spiritual tendencies, whom Žižek targets for rebuke. Their misguided ethical convictions and corresponding lack of political gumption have facilitated the spread of a global corporatism that benefits a relatively small economic elite at the expense of the world’s oppressed masses. With the need to combat this exploitative New World Order informing his philosophizing, Žižek prescribes a dose of Christianity to an anemic and largely impotent Left he diagnoses as suffering from a debilitating malady - postmodern ethical relativism.</p>
<p>Ethical relativism (a term Žižek doesn’t use, but which concisely encapsulates a number of his targets) refers to several related concepts: the idea that all truth claims are contingent - social constructions valid only for members of particular cultures; the rejection of universal truth claims on the ground that asserting a universal truth entails denying, and thus disrespecting, the validity of another’s culture and identity; and the tendency to disavow one’s sincerely and “directly assumed belief[s]” (<span class="booktitle">The Puppet and the Dwarf</span> 7) for fear of offending others or of appearing politically incorrect. Quickly, Žižek’s arguments against these notions are as follows: First, it makes no sense to speak of a relative truth that doesn’t apply universally. For a claim to be considered true, it must, by definition, be presumed to be universally valid for everyone. If others reject the validity of a claim that I believe to be true, that’s because they are mistaken, not because they hold a different subject position or come from a different culture. Second, talk of respecting difference or otherness fetishizes empty abstractions and is effectively meaningless, mere grandstanding rhetoric. In practice, respecting another’s belief or practice requires us to take it seriously enough to judge whether it is true or false, right or wrong.</p>
<p>These first two points, while valid, do not constitute a particularly novel intellectual intervention; Stanley Fish and Walter Benn Michaels (neopragmatists whose theory-has-no-consequences position otherwise clashes with Žižek’s deeply philosophical project: “to reactualize German Idealism”) have been making similar arguments about the limits of liberal principles for over a decade. However, Žižek does contribute something new to Anglo-American debates about the status of belief in postmodern societies with his account of disavowed belief, which begins with a simple premise: “today, we believe more than ever” (6). The catch is that contemporary believers are confused and fail to recognize the extent or the nature of their beliefs, particularly when it comes to “religious matters” (5). Thus, to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s oft-cited formula of cynical reason - “I know what I am doing; nonetheless, I am doing it … ” - Žižek adds a final clause: ” … because I don’t know what I believe” (5).</p>
<p>Our confusion regarding what we believe is understandable given that establishing what belief entails is no straightforward project. What, exactly, does it mean to say that I believe in something? Such a question implies a uniquely modern concept of subjective belief that Žižek finds insufficient: “The direct belief in a truth that is subjectively fully assumed (‘Here I stand!’) is a modern phenomenon, in contrast to traditional beliefs-through distance, like politeness or rituals” (6). The modern notion of belief as subjective inner conviction fails to take into account the intersubjective nature of belief. Belief, Žižek insists, entails believing that others also believe. This is especially true of religious beliefs, which cannot be empirically proven. Such beliefs are materialized in practices, such as rituals and ceremonies, external to us. We perform them for the benefit of what Jacques Lacan dubbed a ‘subject supposed to believe.’</p>
<p>A failure to comprehend how belief externalizes itself in material practices led “Enlightenment critics [to] misread ‘primitive’ myths” (6). By imposing their model of “literal direct belief” on people from tribal cultures, these critics regarded the myths as simply ignorant or naïve (6). Here, Žižek might seem to be making a basic relativist point: that we cannot judge adequately another culture’s beliefs from our perspective. But this is not Žižek’s point at all. If, on the one hand, Žižek rejects the subjective notion of direct belief because it exaggerates the subject’s autonomy and fails to account for the way we stage our beliefs, he is, on the other hand, even more dismissive of the relativist claim that we cannot judge beliefs held by people from other cultures. Postmodern relativists, Žižek would have us see, remain committed to a modern concept of direct belief; they are just in denial about their commitment or timidly try to avoid asserting their beliefs directly.</p>
<p>Žižek, it’s worth noting, frequently uses <span class="lightEmphasis">postmodern</span> as a term of abuse. When he does so, typically, it’s to signal his opposition to the postmodernists’ tendency to place their directly held beliefs at a remove. And who might these postmodernists be? Žižek’s examples include: Deconstructionists whose skepticism requires the positing of “an Other who ‘really believes’ ”; ironists who incessantly place their remarks within scare quotes and (borrowing from Umberto Eco) self-conscious lovers who say things like, “As the poets would have put it, I love you” (6). Such phenomena, which Žižek treats as symptoms of disavowed, displaced, or suspended belief, are a major target of Žižek’s analysis in <span class="booktitle">The Puppet and the Dwarf</span>. One of Žižek’s signature critical moves is to make explicit the underlying presuppositions, the disavowed beliefs, and the obscene fantasies that secretly support our consciously held positions and intentional acts. Although the aforementioned postmodernists pride themselves on being self-reflexive, Žižek pinpoints their blind spot: an anti-foundationalism that resists positing a conceptual totality on the grounds that such thinking risks becoming totalitarian. As a result of their principled anti-foundationalism (which functions as a kind of disavowed foundationalism or, for more canny thinkers, foundationalism under erasure) the postmodernists neglect to take into account the consequences of their epistemological skepticism and self-conscious irony. One particularly detrimental consequence is the general undermining of truth claims in an intellectual climate in which directly asserted beliefs are too readily judged as equivalent forms of dogmatism.</p>
<p>As a psychoanalyst, Žižek believes that our ideas about belief tend to be based on a vision of the human psyche that is too limited. Žižek aspires to discern our <span class="booktitle">unconscious beliefs</span>, which he has usefully defined as “the things we do not know that we know” (<span class="booktitle">Iraq</span> 9). Doing so, of course, is tricky, because we’re unaware that we adhere to these beliefs. Nonetheless, Žižek insists that we can identify the signs, or symptoms, of our unconsciously held beliefs as they manifest themselves materially in our cultural practices and artifacts. For Žižek, any rigorous theory of belief must take into account unconscious beliefs, which are, of course, unknown to the subject holding them. While people may profess their disbelief in a particular ideology, they behave ‘as if’ they actually believe in its authority. By analyzing people’s behavior as manifested in various cultural phenomena, Žižek aims to identify their unconsciously held beliefs and the desires that motivate them. In <span class="booktitle">The Puppet and the Dwarf</span>, he is especially interested in varieties of religious belief.</p>
<p>Discerning widespread ambivalence about people who profess to be true religious believers (are they to be commended for their sincerity or condemned as extremists?), Žižek redefines (postmodern) culture as the practices that follow from our nonserious, ironic, or disavowed beliefs:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">When it comes to religion … we no longer “really believe” today, we just follow (some) religious rituals and mores as part of respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong (nonbelieving Jews obeying kosher rules ‘out of respect for tradition,’ etc.). “I don’t really believe in it, it’s just part of my culture” effectively seems to be the predominant mode of the disavowed/displaced belief characteristic of our times. What is a cultural lifestyle, if not the fact that, although we don’t believe in Santa Claus, there is a Christmas tree in every house, and even in public places every December? Perhaps, then, the “nonfundamentalist “notion of “culture” as distinguished from “real” religion, art, and so on, <span class="lightEmphasis">is</span> in its very core the name for the field of disowned/impersonal beliefs - ‘culture’ is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without ‘taking them seriously’ (7).</p>
<p>Culture, thus defined, refers to the domain of ideas we espouse, things we do, and projects in which we partake but from which we strive to maintain a sophisticated distance. This culturalization of belief - the transformation of our beliefs into cultural lifestyles - has dire ideological consequences. It depoliticizes us, as we are conditioned to tolerate or respect other lifestyles rather than to disagree and debate with others who hold beliefs that we consider to be mistaken. As a result, most contemporary forms of spirituality are complicit with the exploitative socioeconomic status quo. With this premise in the background, Žižek continues his relentless critique of varieties of postmodern skepticism, his critical gaze focused (much of the time) on contemporary religious formations, which he reveals as sites of disavowed belief that feed into political cynicism and apathy. Žižek identifies various contemporary “religious formations” - ranging from Western Buddhism to New Age paganism to deconstructionist-Levinasian Judaism - whose adherents subscribe to modes of disavowed belief that cannot be publicly acknowledged and must remain a “private obscene secret” (6).</p>
<p>Žižek resists these religious formations on the grounds that, despite appearances to the contrary, they function as ideological handmaidens to global capitalism. His aim, however, is not to expose the followers of these faiths as hypocrites whose spiritual values have been too easily trumped by their material interests. “[A]uthentic philosophers,” Žižek suggests, are not interested in analyzing “the hypocrisy of the dominant system,” which is widespread and easily identifiable; “what surprises them is the exact <span class="lightEmphasis">opposite</span> - not that people do not ‘really believe,’ and act upon their professed principles, but that <span class="lightEmphasis">people who profess their cynical distance and radical pragmatic opportunism secretly believe more than they are willing to admit</span>, even if they transpose these beliefs onto (nonexistent) ‘others’ ” (8). Therefore, when Žižek describes modes of disavowed belief, he does not call for a return to more authentic forms of these faiths in place of their superficial, postmodern forms. Rather, he rejects all varieties of these faiths outright on the grounds that their inherent logic promotes political complacency. How so? By embracing an ontology of the integral One, followers of these faiths become inured to systemic socio-economic inequality and are permitted to partake in exploitative market practices with a clear conscience. Stated vulgarly, Žižek rejects these faiths because their underlying ontology enables, and even encourages, their adherents to accommodate themselves to the dictates of the market and to function as ruthless capitalists or, more commonly, docile laborers.</p>
<p>These faiths share two key features - a vision of the universe as a harmonious whole and an ethos that regards all efforts to introduce a split into this universe as being misguided and deluded, if not evil - with debilitating “political implications” (23). New Age paganism, for example, posits the universe as a primal abyss in which all apparent opposites ultimately coincide, while Buddhism “fully assumes the Void as the only true Good” and teaches its practitioners to remain indifferent to phenomenal reality, the “wheel of illusion” (23). And, with deconstructionist-Levinasian Judaism - which Žižek suggests “has become almost the hegemonic ethico-spiritual attitude of today’s intellectuals” (8) - “the assertion of Otherness leads to the boring, monotonous sameness of Otherness itself” (24). In other words, when we construe otherness as an unknowable alterity all particular instances of the other become variations of the same, a same that is beyond our comprehension and which we cannot judge. Thus, despite what those who organize under the banner of multiculturalism think, the ethical call to remain open to a radical Otherness encourages passivity in our encounters with others that ultimately translates into political apathy or inaction.</p>
<p>Žižek also argues that multiculturalist calls to respect difference often disguise a disavowed, reactionary impulse - the desire to keep the other at a distance. In other words, one way of respecting the other is via segregation, which ensures that your beliefs, practices, and bodies don’t come into contact. But Žižek’s core argument against the liberal multiculturalists’ agenda is that it has yielded divisive identity politics that have turned Leftists away from what should be their primary concern, organizing and working for economic equality and an end to poverty. Unlike the egalitarian demand to redistribute wealth and material resources more evenly, it costs the ruling class nothing to respect difference and promote diversity. That’s why multinational corporations notorious for their exploitative labor practices have been quick to adopt the multiculturalist platform.</p>
<p>In short, the aforementioned faiths, and their political offshoot, multiculturalism, encourage adherents to tolerate the socioeconomic status quo and are complicit with political conservatism and the material inequalities its policies regard as inevitable and necessary. For this reason, the Left must purge itself of the ethos that these faiths share - an ethic of alterity or otherness. Žižek attributes much of the contemporary Left’s problems to a misguided commitment to otherness, which has resulted in a fractured political agenda, based primarily on vague identitarian appeals to respect and tolerate cultural difference. Identity politics fails to examine the problem of inequality from within a properly totalizing framework. Consequently, identity politics fails to recognize, let alone address, the systemic exploitation that is required for capitalism to function. Therefore, the Left should concern itself with combating the antagonism at the core of the various localized forms of inequality - global capitalism. As Žižek sees it, too many Leftists have become complacent liberals who are secretly satisfied with the existing socioeconomic order and the economic relations between people that it presupposes - at least that’s what all their multiculturalist rhetoric about celebrating diversity and respecting “otherness” ultimately implies.</p>
<p>The Left must understand that its ultimate commitment is not to liberal tolerance or “all-encompassing Compassion” (32) but to eliminating material inequality. Radical changes in the social order are needed, and a crucial starting point is to denaturalize the existing capitalist order, to make people aware that market forces are not omnipotent. But consciousness raising alone will not suffice. What’s needed is a willingness to introduce a “radical imbalance into the social edifice” (95). Žižek’s wager is that “Christian love” - defined as “a violent passion to introduce a Difference, a gap in the order of being, to privilege and elevate some object in the order of being, to privilege and elevate some object at the expense of others” (33) - can be a catalyst that will provoke the Left to resume collectively its emancipatory struggle.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">Regarding Religion: Does Žižek Repeat the Christian Right?</span><br />Given the Christian Right’s prominence in the United States today, it’s worth raising a couple basic questions. First, does Žižek’s account of the “framework of suspended belief” and the three ‘postsecular’ religious options that it permits accurately describe the contemporary American sociopolitical reality? According to Cornel West - another popular philosopher, public intellectual, and dynamic orator who deplores the state of contemporary liberalism and argues that the Left must reclaim the Christian legacy - surveys suggest that “80 percent of Americans call themselves Christians, 72 percent expect the Second Coming of Christ, and 40 percent say they speak to the Christian God on intimate terms at least twice a week” (West 147). Might Žižek be overstating the extent of Western postsecularism and its depoliticizing influence?</p>
<p>Consider the current U.S. political scene. George W. Bush governs as the most openly religious president in American history, and Bush’s unabashed invocations of Jesus Christ, with whom he professes to have a personal relationship, garnered him roughly seventy percent of the evangelical Christian vote in 2000 and probably more in the 2004 election. During the 2004 election season Republicans successfully played the religion card to mobilize their evangelical Christian base. Tactics included everything from dropping “evangelical code words” (Stam) in stump speeches to signal Bush’s rejection of social policies (upholding <span class="lightEmphasis">Roe v. Wade</span>, defending civil and economic rights for homosexuals) supported by many moderate conservatives, to mass mailing pamphlets warning that, if elected, Democrats would ban the Bible. However deplorable many of these tactics were, the political arrogance they expressed was not unexpected. Although approximately 500,000 more votes were cast for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, the 9/11 attacks provided Bush with political cover and political capital, and the Bush-Cheney administration ruled during its first term as though it had a sweeping mandate from the entire American public. Consequently, the religious Right’s agenda assumed center stage in American politics and political commentators began to refer to the influence of America’s Evangelical Christians as the Jesus Factor.</p>
<p>Witness, for example, Bush’s faith-based initiatives to turn a range of social services over to private religious groups (federal funds have gone almost exclusively to Christian or ‘multidenominational’ groups), the growing assault on women’s reproductive rights, calls to teach creationism as the theory of ‘intelligent design’ in science classrooms, and, most significantly, the wars the U.S. is waging in two predominantly Muslim nations, Iraq and Afghanistan. These Middle Eastern wars threaten to escalate into a full-blown holy war. Islamic radicals have already declared a <span class="foreignWord">jihad</span> against the United States, talk of a clash of civilizations abounds, and rumors persist that neoconservatives in the Pentagon have plans for effecting regime changes in Iran and Syria. Although Americans’ support for the Iraq War has diminished, many evangelical Christians, including President Bush, appear to regard a global holy war as inevitable and perhaps even welcome such a conflagration.</p>
<p>Second, given all the aforementioned indicators that American politics and policy continues to move further rightward, and given that the so-called “Jesus Factor” is providing much of the impetus for this shift, how should we respond to Žižek’s insistence that the Left must reclaim and redeem the Christian legacy? And what are we to make of Žižek’s appeals to “Christian intolerant, violent love” (32-3)? Is this sort of Christian love what’s needed? Such language sounds disturbingly like the rhetoric of the far Right, the abortion-clinic bombers and the hawks who advocate using nuclear weapons in the Middle East (the kill-‘em-all-and-let-God-sort-‘em-out school of foreign policy).</p>
<p>On the one hand, my sense is that the postsecular situation Žižek describes applies more to Western Europe than the U.S., where a far larger percentage of the population professes to believe in God, attends church regularly, votes for politicians who purport to share their religious values, and where evangelical Christian fundamentalism is on the rise. Although many European nations have a Christian denomination as their official state religion, relatively few European citizens identify themselves as devout Christians. Consequently, some demographers predict that within the next few decades Islam could become the most influential religion in Europe, which may threaten the secular liberal traditions there.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the general phenomenon Žižek describes, of disavowed spiritual beliefs creating uncanny symptoms within seemingly secular populations, is clearly prevalent in the U.S. as well. His description concurs, for example, with accounts of the religiosity (or lack thereof) of voters, living primarily in urban areas, from the ‘blue states.’ Indeed, the conflict between John Kerry’s Catholicism (which conservative Catholics challenged because of Kerry’s pro-choice voting record) and his catholicism (Kerry’s attempts to be intellectually comprehensive and broad minded were spun in the media as ‘flip-flopping’) provides a model case of the politics of disavowed belief in the U.S. Moreover, if Žižek’s framework of suspended belief is properly understood - as describing the tension between living a life that takes for granted technocratic (if not necessarily scientific) knowledge and living a life according to fundamental principles of religious faith - then its applicability to much of the U.S. population, including the most devout Christians in the GOP, becomes apparent. After all, the vast majority of, say, Mormons in Salt Lake City or evangelicals in Dallas have been interpellated as capitalists first and Christians second.</p>
<p>Along similar lines, Žižek would argue that the Left Behind crowd misses the point of orthodox Christianity. The networked evangelical Right - so successful at marketing Jesus in its multimedia broadcasts and at superchurches, theme parks, and pop concerts - places so much emphasis on anxiously preparing for the apocalypse because it cannot imagine life on Earth being ordered in a more economically fair and just way. Instead, evangelicals fantasize about the end of the world as we know it, convinced that their alleged ‘personal relationships’ with Christ will provide them access to the Kingdom of God while the majority of dupes on the planet (including Christians of more traditional denominations) are left behind to suffer. One of Žižek’s favorite maxims, of course, is that the non-duped err (<span class="booktitle">Looking Awry</span> 69-87). To this end, Žižek asserts in the <a href="http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/desublimation"><span class="booktitle">ebr</span> interview</a>: “The so-called moral majority fundamentalism is - to put it in slightly speculative Hegelian terms - the form of the appearance of its opposite. Let’s be serious: Nobody will convince me that people like Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, and George W. Bush believe. They may even be sincere, but … from Hegel we learned how to undermine a position: not through comparing it directly with reality to assert its truth status, but seeing how the very subjective stance from which you announce a certain position undermines this position” (Rasmussen).</p>
<p>As for the question of whether Žižek’s proselyztizing on behalf of the Christian legacy repeats the evangelical Right’s rhetoric: actually, his arguments tend to reference more traditional conservative thinkers. While <span class="booktitle">The Puppet and the Dwarf</span> finds Žižek admiring G.K. Chesterston’s “conceptual matrix - that of asserting the truly subversive, even revolutionary, character of orthodoxy” (35) he deploys the conservative Catholic thinker’s ideas in order to oppose the logic and the values - of postmodern permissiveness and “ordained transgression” (36) - that fuel hyper-capitalism. In so doing, Žižek practices the politics of overidentification that he advocates in <span class="booktitle">Contingency, Hegemony, and Universality</span>: “in so far as power relies on its ‘inherent transgression’, then, sometimes, at least - overidentifying with the explicit power discourse - <span class="lightEmphasis">ignoring</span> this inherent obscene underside and simply taking the power discourse at its (public) word, acting as if it really means what it explicitly says (and promises) - can be the most effective way of disturbing its smooth functioning” (220). Žižek never tires of reiterating the paradox of postmodern permissiveness: the way in which the ostensibly liberating attitudes that inform contemporary, free-market, consumer cultures - e.g. anti-authoritarian skepticism, liberal tolerance, libertarian irreverence, etc. - can engender new forms of oppression. The rejection of traditional forms of authority on the grounds that they are oppressive and patriarchal, for example, has not necessarily resulted in a state of greater freedom for most people; rather, the authoritative Other’s direct prohibitive injunctions - which we are free to reject, if we choose - get internalized in the form of a domineering superego that is constantly enjoining us to “Enjoy!” Because this persistent demand - “to resist, to violate, to go further and further” (<span class="booktitle">Puppet</span> 56) - is so vague, we feel anxious.</p>
<p>Convincingly, Žižek argues that the superego injunction to enjoy transgressive pleasures has become the new Norm, and “the price we pay for the absence of guilt is anxiety” (57). Our generalized anxiety, which arises because we feel <span class="lightEmphasis">obligated</span> to enjoy, provides various others - corporations, employers, advertisers, politicians, etc. - new means of psychologically manipulating us. Therefore, in this permissive “age of anxiety,” overidentifying with traditional Christian prohibitions can provide a frame within which we can enjoy our pleasures guiltily and without debilitating anxiety. That’s the theory anyway, and Žižek would be the first to acknowledge that the strategy of overidentification is a risky one. One of his polemical points is that there are “transcendent Causes […] for which we are ready to risk our life” (95) and that we are not “really alive” unless we take up these causes with an “excessive intensity” that overrides our “focus on mere survival” (94).</p>
<p>The opening of <span class="booktitle">The Fragile Absolute</span> indicates that, ultimately, some mode of Marxism is Žižek’s chosen cause: “Christianity and Marxism <span class="lightEmphasis">should</span> fight on the same side of the barricade against the onslaught of new spiritualisms - the authentic Christian legacy is much too precious to be left to the fundamentalist freaks” (2). <span class="booktitle">The Puppet and the Dwarf</span> elaborates on the idea that the Left must reclaim the Christian legacy by harnessing its immanent and still largely untapped revolutionary potential. Žižek asserts: “My claim here is not merely that I am a materialist through and through, and that the subversive kernel of Christianity is accessible also to a materialist approach; my thesis is much stronger: this kernel is accessible <span class="lightEmphasis">only</span> to a materialist approach - and vice versa: to become a true dialectical materialist, one should go through the Christian experience” (6). The “subversive kernel of Christianity” that Žižek extracts for his readers, then, is presented as the authentic alternative to the “perverse core” referred to in the subtitle. But before explaining the distinction Žižek makes between Christianity’s subversive kernel and its perverse core, it’s worth examining how the book’s intriguing main title cues readers in to the politics of Žižek’s critical project and the cause for which he is fighting.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">Courage, Humor, Cunning, Fortitude: Benjamin’s Messianic Materialism</span><br />Žižek’s title, <span class="booktitle">The Puppet and the Dwarf</span>, alludes to the apologue that opens Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” a text Žižek repeatedly references in his ever-growing corpus. Because of the extent to which Benjamin’s theses have influenced Žižek’s thinking about the relationship between theology and historical materialism, I recommend reading them and the “Revolution as Repetition” subchapter from <span class="booktitle">The Sublime Object of Ideology</span> (136-42) before cracking <span class="booktitle">The Puppet and the Dwarf</span>. For the benefit of readers who don’t have these texts at hand, I will comment briefly on why Žižek regards Benjamin’s notion of theology to be a vital contribution to Marxist thought.</p>
<p>First, some background on Benjamin’s theses: written at the outbreak of World War II, shortly after Benjamin’s release from a French internment camp and before his tragic attempt to flee Europe, Benjamin’s final finished piece of writing consists of a series of meditations on what constitutes a revolutionary experience of time and history. In his eighteen theses, Benjamin advocates for a decidedly interested approach to history, an historical materialism cognizant of the “tradition of the oppressed” (<span class="booktitle">Illuminations</span> 257) and sympathetic to their struggles. Historical materialism, Benjamin declares, “wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out in a moment of danger” (255). Such images, comprised from disparate historical materials, can be juxtaposed and configured into provocative “constellations” that manifest the libratory desires of a proletarian collective unconscious. In this way, the materialist historiographer’s montages will infuse a much-needed sense of political urgency about present dangers and abet resistance to Fascism.</p>
<p>The rise of German Fascism, Benjamin asserts, was facilitated by the complacency of the Social Democrats, who failed to grasp that “the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is the not the exception but the rule” (257) and whose programs for gradual reform inadequately addressed the economic crisis between the wars. Their political complacency was informed by a naïve progressivism inherited from 19th-century historiography, which unquestioningly accepted the ruling class’s self-centered optimism and overlooked the widespread suffering of those who “toil” anonymously. Insisting, famously, that “[t]here is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism and warning that empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers,” (256) Benjamin calls for a people’s history cognizant of “class struggle,” the “fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things would exist” (254) and written in solidarity with the oppressed majority. His first thesis suggests that theology must invigorate historical materialism if the latter is to succeed in its immediate mission - to make apparent the urgent imperative to fight Fascism.</p>
<p>In making his case, Benjamin stages a striking technological allegory featuring an 18th-century chess-playing automaton. In this allegory, Benjamin figures historical materialism as the chess-playing puppet and theology as a wizened, hunchbacked dwarf. In order to “win all the time” (253) in the chess match symbolizing the ongoing global geopolitical struggle, the hidden dwarf must animate the puppet, secretly pulling its strings. Despite being shrunken and small of stature, theology will play a covert but decisive role in the anti-Fascist struggle. Infused with theology’s messianic perspective, the historical materialist will be prayerfully alert to potentially redemptive moments in the past, prepared to “retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger” (255).</p>
<p>The materialist historiographer’s project - the reactualization of “the depository of historical knowledge” embedded in the memories and archives of the oppressed class - demands “the notion of a present … in which time stands still and has come to a stop” (262). This moment of temporal fixity, in which the “flow of thoughts” is arrested and the presumed causal links between historical events are severed, enables the historical materialist to remain “in control of his powers” and to attain a conceptual clarity regarding events in the “oppressed past.” He can glean concealed meanings in images from the past and redeem revolutionary potentialities in events hitherto overlooked or misinterpreted by traditional hermeneutical historians and historicists - both of whom wrongly assume that their methodologies can adequately contain and master the contingencies of the present. On the one hand, the traditional historians, “who wish to relive an era,” aspire to “blot out everything they know about the later course of history” and to empathetically reexperience the past as it unfolded (256). Benjamin rejects this hermeneutical desire to bracket off the present, regarding it as an “indolence of the heart, acedia, which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly” (256). One’s judgments are always and already shaped by one’s subjective position as an observer, and in falsely denying his present-day position, the historian inevitably empathizes with the experience of ruling classes.</p>
<p>On the other hand, historicists err in making too much of their subject positions. They assert that we can never truly know the past because our understanding of it will always be tainted by our present-day knowledge. The problem with this epistemological claim is that it leads to a banal historical relativism, a refusal make definitive value judgments about the past on the grounds that its truths are ultimately unknowable. Such a refusal amounts to a de facto acceptance of the dominant historical narrative, written from the perspective of the ruling class. Similarly, for Žižek, it produces a posthistorical impasse beneficial to the capitalist status quo: an “eternal present of multiple narrativizations” in which “total dynamism [and] frantic activity” coincide with a “deeper immobility” (<span class="booktitle">Puppet</span> 134). In contrast - and for Žižek this is Benjamin’s key theoretical insight - with historical materialism it is the <span class="lightEmphasis">present</span>, not the past, that is relativized and remains open for future rewriting: “what the proper <span class="lightEmphasis">historical</span> stance (as opposed to historicism) ‘relativizes’ is not the past (always distorted by our present point of view) but, paradoxically, <span class="lightEmphasis">the present itself</span> - our present can be conceived only as the outcome (not of what actually happened in the past, but also) of the crushed potentials for the future that were contained in the past “(<span class="lightEmphasis">Fragile Absolute</span> 90).</p>
<p>Benjamin’s materialist historiographer approaches the past in solidarity with the oppressed masses, whose energies - whose “courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude” (<span class="booktitle">Illuminations</span> 255) - he aims to harness in order to make a revolutionary intervention in the present. His mission: “to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history” (263). This theoretical dynamiting of the past will generate a Hegelian <span class="foreignWord">Aufheben</span>, in which a “specific life” or “specific work” is preserved by the historical materialist while simultaneously being negated, excavated from its place in the illusory “continuum of history” (262-3). This process dialectically transforms the event into a catalyst in the present moment, where, ideally, it will “have retroactive force” (255) and trigger revolutionary acts that brings about real socio-economic change. Although Benjamin’s logic might seem to be radically anti-Hegelian, Žižek argues that it is not because “the suspension of movement is a key moment of the dialectical process” (<span class="booktitle">Sublime Object</span> 44). Žižek intends his writings about Christ and St. Paul to do similar dynamiting work on the Christian tradition.</p>
<p>Like Benjamin, Žižek aims to “wrest tradition away from the conformism that is about to overpower it” (<span class="booktitle">Illuminations</span> 255) and advocates for a theologically inspired revolutionary awareness at a moment when the Left’s egalitarian ideals are endangered. However, Žižek distinguishes the current politico-ideological landscape from that in which Benjamin wrote. After the Soviet Union’s fall, historical materialism has been discredited, and in the West various forms of spirituality are in vogue, competing with a resurgence of religious fundamentalism that is global in scope. Consequently, Žižek reverses the terms in Benjamin’s apologue. He figures historical materialism as the wizened dwarf who must remain hidden while secretly manipulating a mechanistic theology to advance its agenda. This reversal is not the only difference between Benjamin - whose “Messianic Marxism” (134) is thoroughly Judaic - and Žižek, who endorses the “shift from Judaism to Christianity with regard to the Event […] in terms of the status of the Messiah” (135).</p>
<p>While Benjamin and Žižek agree that revolutionary activism requires “the unconditional urgency of a Now,” (<span class="booktitle">Puppet</span> 135) Žižek finds Christianity to be more conducive to sustaining such a state. “Jewish messianic expectation,” nervously preparing for the Messiah’s arrival, breeds passivity (136). Žižek prefers the “basic Christian stance … <span class="lightEmphasis">the expected Messiah has already arrived</span> […] we are already redeemed,” which, paradoxically, promotes activity (135-6). There can be no waiting around for the sublime God, the absolute Other, to appear. Christians must work together in order “to live up to,” to determine the meaning of, God’s act - dying on the cross as Christ ;- through which he revealed Himself to be one of us. Although Jews “stand for the universality of humankind,” Judaism remains bound to identitarian logic through its notion of Jews being the ‘Chosen People,’ whose ethnic identity resides in its adherence to the Torah’s laws, “a series of arbitrary particular rules (kosher food, etc.)” (<span class="booktitle">On Belief</span> 127-8).</p>
<p>In Žižek’s account - indebted to Alain Badiou’s <span class="booktitle">St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism</span> - the core Christian narrative involves the way this act, the Messiah’s death, and Paul’s fidelity to it suspend the Jewish law and clear the way for a new, proto-revolutionary community. Thanks to Paul, an unpredictable shift in the Symbolic Order occurred around two thousand years ago. Christianity went from being one of many esoteric Jewish sects competing for adherents in the Roman Empire into the religion of universality, whose followers constitute a new type of human subject. Thus, Žižek characterizes Paul as “great institutionalizer,” like Lenin (and Lacan) (9). The following homology between the theological and political makes clearer what’s at stake: Jews map onto the working class (both social groups retaining an ontological, empirically verifiable component) whereas Christians map onto the proletariat (both being defined solely by their members “assuming a certain <span class="lightEmphasis">subjective stance”</span>) (<span class="booktitle">Ticklish Subject</span> 226-7). For Žižek, the latter groups are - in theory - more inclusive and more liberated and therefore preferable.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">Christianity: The Perverse Core vs. The Subversive Kernel</span><br />So much for the allusive title. Now what about that scandalous subtitle? “The perverse core of Christianity” has nothing, necessarily, to do with widely stigmatized behaviors or aberrant sexual practices, such as the priestly pedophilia that has disgraced the Catholic Church (though this topic is mentioned in passing). Žižek discusses perversion as a Lacanian, for whom the term has a precise technical meaning: it describes a “particular psychic structure - a relation to the paternal function,” the Law of the Father (Rothenberg and Foster 4). Perverts believe they have a privileged relationship to the prohibitive law that regulates access to <span class="foreignWord">jouissance</span>(intense enjoyment beyond pleasure) and the big Other who authorized the prohibitive law. Perversion constitutes a kind of “epistemophilia,” an absolute conviction that one knows what the big Other desires - rigorous obedience of the law - and that one’s (dis)obedience, i.e. obligatory transgressions, constitute an essential source of the Other’s enjoyment.</p>
<p>So convinced, perverts stage scenarios in which they give themselves over entirely to the enjoyment of the Other. Deriving excessive enjoyment via their “self-instrumentalization” - in slavishly working for and becoming the “object-instrument” of the Other’s <span class="foreignWord">jouissance</span> - perverts effectively enslave themselves (<span class="booktitle">Tarrying</span> 193-5). In <span class="booktitle">Tarrying With the Negative</span> (which, along with <span class="booktitle">The Sublime Object of Ideology</span> and <span class="booktitle">The Ticklish Subject</span>, remains one of Žižek’s most systematically organized and thus indispensable titles) Žižek associates the libidinal economy of this “perverse self-objectivization” with totalitarianism. <span class="booktitle">The Puppet and the Dwarf</span> follows up with many clarifying and surprising examples of “perverse desubjectivization: [in which] the subject avoids its constitutive splitting by posting itself directly as an instrument of the Other’s Will” (29): the Zen Buddhist, for instance, who, in an effort to unite with the “primordial Void” (28) renounces his Selfhood and ascribes agency to his weapon.</p>
<p>Most significantly, the logic of perverse desubjectivization can be found at Christianity’s “hidden perverse core,” which Žižek gets at via a series of rhetorical questions: “if it is prohibited to eat from the Tree of Knowledge in Paradise, why did God put it there in the first place? Is it not that this was a part of His perverse strategy first to seduce Adam and Eve into the Fall, in order then to save them? That is to say: should one not apply Paul’s insight into how the prohibitive law creates sin to this very first prohibition also?” (15). Both the New and the Old Testaments feature stories involving heroic transgressions, stunning betrayals that in the big theological picture appear to be necessary, part of God’s divine plan. From a Lacanian perspective, this divine plan looks like God’s “perverse strategy”: God, the ultimate big Other, established the sin-creating prohibitive law for the purpose of setting Himself up as man’s redeemer. After invoking prohibitive laws (in Paradise, God’s injunction prohibiting Adam and Eve from eating from the Tree of Knowledge; at the Last Supper, Christ’s “disavowed injunction” to Judas to betray him.) the Other then seduces man into betraying Him. Why? So that the Other can forgive and redeem the sinner, thereby displaying His divine benevolence.</p>
<p>Žižek intends us to recognize how this salvation fantasy functions ideologically: it entices Christians to assume a doubly alluring subject position - transgressive sinner and innocent instrument of God’s will - that desubjectivizes them. In this scenario - arguably the predominant, albeit disavowed, approach to Christianity - God resorts to “obscure, arch-Stalinist manipulation,” (16) while we humans are interpellated as perverts, savoring our role as instruments of the totalitarian Other’s will.</p>
<p>Perverse Christianity plays upon, by giving support to, believers’ disavowed elitist (supported via the fantasy about enjoying a privileged relationship with God) and hedonist (supported via the fantasy of enjoying extreme pleasure without suffering any consequences) tendencies. “Christianity offers a devious stratagem for indulging our desires without having to pay the price for them, for enjoying life without the fear of decay and debilitating pain awaiting us at the end of the day […] this is the ultimate message of Christ’s sacrifice: you can indulge in your desires, and enjoy; I took the price for it upon myself” (49). This message is captured concisely in the American colloquialism “Ya gotta sin to be saved” - a line often delivered with a knowing wink. The wink, of course, signals that one recognizes the statement’s obscene underside, its unstated implication: so you better get sinning or you’re damned! In other words, not only are your transgressions excused, they’re necessary for your salvation. This perverse “logic of reimbursement” (171) explains the tremendous appeal - upon which opportunistic politicians have capitalized - of evangelical Christianity in America’s self-indulgent consumer culture.</p>
<p>Take George W. Bush: after ‘discovering’ Jesus, candidate Bush’s potentially career-limiting and sometimes criminal behavior (drunk driving, alcoholism, cocaine use, going AWOL from National Guard duty, etc.) could be acknowledged publicly, framed within a larger religious narrative about conversion and redemption where they could be not simply dismissed (as no-so-youthful mistakes) but justified as a necessary stage of his spiritual rebirth. But if, “in the perverse functioning of Christianity, religion is, in effect, evoked as a safeguard allowing us to enjoy life with impunity,” Žižek reminds us that that we cannot have it all: “in succumbing to this perverse call, we compromise our desire […] what really matters” (49). Following Lacan, desire here denotes “the metonymy of our being” - the divided subject’s endless pursuit of various object-causes in an ongoing struggle to achieve an integrated existence - and giving up on one’s desire constitutes the gravest ethical betrayal of all (Lacan 321).</p>
<p>In contrast, the “subversive kernel of Christianity” involves following Paul’s heroic example and rigorously maintaining one’s desire, one’s fidelity to the Event - Christ’s crucifixion. It is essential to grasp the truly radical significance of the Passion, a sign of God’s impotence and agape: “Perhaps the true achievement of Christianity is to elevate a loving (imperfect) Being to he place of God, that is, of ultimate perfection. That is the kernel of the Christian experience” (115). To partake of this experience, we must discern the agnostic doubt expressed in Christ’s lament on the cross: “Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?” This poignant line - in which Christ’s faith and hope waivers - calls on us to identify with Christ’s recognition that God too is a fragile, divided subject. In Lacanian terms, Christ’s death reveals the nonexistence of the big Other, the fact that there is no absolute, all-powerful authority who can save us, or - to put a more uplifting spin on it - to whom we are responsible. What is revealed is a profound lesson about freedom: we posit the symbolic order, the rule of Law; it does not foreordain our Earthly activities and provides no guarantees about “the ‘objective meaning’ of our deeds” (171).</p>
<p>Such a revelation - what Žižek elsewhere refers to as the abyss of freedom - is intensely terrifying and painful, but also liberating. Christ’s death is followed by his resurrection as the Holy Spirit, the new community of believers, “deprived of its support in the big Other” (171). Ultimately, it is the emergence of the Pauline community that interests Žižek in Christianity, “the religion of atheism” (171). Now is the time for the political Left to fulfill the Pauline legacy by organizing as new revolutionary collective.</p>
<h2>Bibliography</h2>
<p>Benjamin, Walter. <span class="booktitle">Illuminations: Essays and Reflections</span>. 1955. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1978.</p>
<p>Lacan, Jacques. <span class="booktitle">The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis</span>. New York: Norton, 1992.</p>
<p>Rabaté, Jean-Michel. <span class="booktitle">Jacques Lacan: Psychoanalysis and the Subject of Literature</span>. New York: Palgrave, 2001.</p>
<p>Rasmussen, Eric Dean. <a href="http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/desublimation">“Liberation Hurts: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek”</a>. <span class="booktitle">Electronic Book Review</span>. Vers. 4. 2005. Rpt. in shorter version as “The Last Hegelian: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek” in <span class="booktitle">The Minnesota Review</span> 61-2 (2004): 79-93.</p>
<p>Rothenberg, Molly Anne and Dennis A. Foster. “Introduction. Beneath the Skin: Perversion and Social Analysis.” <span class="booktitle">Perversion and the Social Relation</span>. Ed. Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis A. Foster, and Slavoj Žižek. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.</p>
<p>Stam, Juan. <a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20031222/stam">“Bush’s Religious Language”</a>, <span class="booktitle">The Nation</span>, 277.21 (Dec. 22, 2003).</p>
<p>West, Cornel. <span class="booktitle">Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism</span>. New York: Penguin, 2004.</p>
<p>Žižek, Slavoj. <span class="booktitle">The Fragile Absolute: or, Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for?</span> New York: Verso, 2000.</p>
<p>___. <span class="booktitle">Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle</span>. New York: Verso, 2004.</p>
<p>___. <span class="booktitle">Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture</span>. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.</p>
<p>___. <span class="booktitle">On Belief</span>. New York: Routledge, 2001.</p>
<p>___. <span class="booktitle">Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences</span>. New York: Routledge, 2003.</p>
<p>___. <span class="booktitle">The Puppet and the Dwarf</span>. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.</p>
<p>___. <span class="booktitle">The Sublime Object of Ideology</span>. New York: Verso, 1989.</p>
<p>___. <span class="booktitle">Tarrying With the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology</span>. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993.</p>
<p>___. <span class="booktitle">The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology</span>. New York: Verso, 1999.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/zizek">zizek</a>, <a href="/tags/neoliberalism">neoliberalism</a>, <a href="/tags/christianity">christianity</a>, <a href="/tags/religion">religion</a>, <a href="/tags/philosophy">philosophy</a>, <a href="/tags/ideology">ideology</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1122 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/heretical#comments